dj bean

Now it's on Donald Fehr and NHLPA to get a deal done

The league and the players are set to meet on Wednesday as the NHL tries to save its season.

Even though it’s the NHL and that typically means illogical things will happen, it’s really, really tough to see these sides not coming together on a new CBA soon. If they don’t, it will be for one of two reasons: 1) Because the owners truly pulled all that they offered last week off the table (as Gary Bettman said Thursday night) and won’t move back to where they were, and 2) Because of Donald Fehr.

The biggest wild card, as has been the case all along, is Fehr. The NHLPA executive director is known to be both an excellent union leader and a tough negotiator from his time as the head of the MLBPA from 1986-2009, and while the players should be viewed as the good guys in this negotiation, Fehr might be doing more to prolong the lockout than to end it.

If the players were truly of the mind to take whatever fair-enough deal came along in order to get back on the ice, they would have done so last week. The owners bumped up what they were offering on their “make-whole” provision (money to offset the players’ hockey-related revenue dropping) and tabled a take-it-or-leave-it offer that insisted upon the CBA being for 10 years with an opt-out after eight years and term limits on contracts to be five years, or seven years for a team’s own free agents.

If you’re the vast majority of NHL players – ones who aren’t making mammoth dollars and would never dream of getting a deal for five years – that’s an acceptable deal. With how loony the owners’ initial proposals were over the summer (players’ HRR dropping from 57 percent to 46 without a “make whole,” 10 years in the league before one can be an unrestricted free agent, etc.), this offer would definitely appear to be acceptable for the average NHL player.

Yet that offer wasn’t even put to a vote. Instead, the players countered the owners’ proposal with one with a shorter CBA length (eight years with an opt-out after six) and an eight-year limit for contracts with deals allowed to be extended eight years ahead. What bottom-six forward or non-top-pairing defenseman would care about any of that?

Either way, it was enough to infuriate the owners and halt last week’s progress. There are 750 members of the union, and guess how many players have contracts of eight years? That would be 22. So the fight for something that’s pretty rare in the NHL and only applies to the top earners was enough to keep all the players from getting paychecks.

What’s even more surprising (well, not surprising; it is a union) is that any rumblings of frustration from players have been incredibly muted. There have been some reports of grumblings from anonymous players, but nowhere near to the point where Fehr would need to worry that his union was getting tired of his act. Players young and old, rich and not-as-rich stand behind Fehr, but where is he taking them?

“(Players) are angry, but they also understand that we’ve done everything that we can, every step of the way and nothing’s going to change (owners’) mindset,” NHLPA executive Mathieu Schneider said recently on The Hockey News Radio Show. “The one thing I will that I will tell you is if the players give in now, that’s going to guarantee another lockout when this deal is up.”

Maybe they believe that, and there’s something to be said for getting the right deal now to prevent a similar mess in six, eight, 10 or however many years. It’s just hard to imagine that five-and-seven-year contracts will end up being a major problem down the road.

Not surprisingly (and very comically) the owners don’t want Fehr in the negotiating room. Yes, progress was made without him during the players/owners-only meetings last week, but wanting to negotiate without Fehr entirely at this point is like asking the players to pull their goalie for the entire third period in a tied game.

It’s a bit of a predicament, but what else would you expect from the NHL? If Fehr is in the room, the owners have said it “could be a deal-breaker,” Jets defenseman Ron Hainsey told the New York Times over the weekend. Yet if he’s in the room, he’s turning down a pretty good-looking deal at a pretty late point in the process. The solution might be for Donald Fehr to do something uncharacteristic by compromising more than he’s known for. Fehr’s said that the financial particulars have essentially been agreed upon, so the stakes are too high to continue to hold out for lesser stipulations.

If the players want there to be a season, it shouldn’t be hard: Get the owners to offer what they had on the table last week and put it to a vote. If the majority is truly opposed, then the sides were either farther apart than Fehr said, or there are a lot of middle-the-pack players who are really considerate of their richer superstar brethren.

The players knew what they were getting into when they hired Fehr. It was going to get ugly, and it was probably going to take some time. Yet the point’s been proven, and the owners have moved far enough that desperation should have kicked in by now. Assuming the owners don’t pull a 180, Fehr might be the last major roadblock preventing a new CBA.

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